Friday, October 19, 2007

"Living with Art"


The book from the picture is a textbook from class Art Appreciation. The title is “Living with Art” by Mark Getlein. This is a 7th edition of the book with CD included. The book is huge! It has around 600 pages and is heavy like a hundred stones. Now I started to understand why students have wheeled backpacks. The cover has a painting Marie-Denise Villers “Young Woman Drawing” (1801) on the front and on the back cover painting Anon , “The storm” (1760-70).
This book is very well-organized. At first it has Brief Contest and then, the Contents with specification about every chapter with subsections. “Living is Art” includes: 5 parts, which is: Introduction, The Vocabulary of Art, Two-Dimensional Media, Three- Dimensional Media and Arts in Time. Each one of them got around 3-9 separate chapters, for instance: Living with Art, The visual elements, Drawing, Painting, Prints, Sculpture and Installation, Ancient Mediterranean Worlds, Arts of Islam and of Africa. Every few pages are one, gray page about artist’s life. It was one of our homework to do a presentation about these artists. Each student got one artist and had to find his art-works and tell the people what he studied about him. The book contains a lot of pictures- hundred of them.
I have already read four chapters: Living with Art, What is art, Themes of Art and the Visual Elements (120 pages). Every reading was as an assignment. We had to read the part and answer the questions on “reading guide”. I’m interested in topics like Graphic design, Illustration, Photography, Film and Video since I’m interested in it to become my carrier.
I like this book even though when I saw it the first time it scared me. What I like is like I said before very good organization. You can easily find everything what you need, or from the tables of contests or from the index on the back. It even has a glossary. The pictures which they included in every chapter are very helpful to understand what they are talking about.
The language is just right. There are some worlds that I don’t understand but it doesn’t disturb too much. In my opinion the book “Living with Art” is very useful for people whose interested is in any parts of art.

1 comment:

Denise said...

Kasia -- that looks like a heavy and difficult book. I'm impressed that you have read so many chapters so far. It's great that you have reading guides to help you read each chapter.